Luk Claes
reported
about the state of the upcoming stable release Debian GNU/Linux 5.0
Lenny. While there are still a lot of release critical bugs open, he
explained that there is only a short list of bugs that must
absolutely be fixed for Lenny. At the moment the most important blocking
issue is the missing second release candidate for the debian-installer, which
is still being worked
on. Christian Perrier
pointed
out, that the best way to help the debian-installer team is to test the so
called daily builds of the installation images, which are available from
the debian-installer
website.

The release could also be affected by the outcome of the recently started vote on the General
Resolution titled Lenny and resolving DFSG violations. The vote has
been discussed controversially on the debian-vote mailing list; for the full
discussion please refer to the mailing list
archives.

In related news, Peter Palfrader
wondered
whether the PA-RISC architecture (also known as "HPPA") is currently fit to be
released with Lenny, since Debian's own HPPA infrastructure is in very bad
shape. When several people offered their private HPPA hardware, Martin
Zobel-Helas pointed
out, that the real problem is not missing hardware, but a kernel related
issue, which needs to be fixed. Helge Deller reported on
progress regarding that issue, but it is not yet fixed completely.

A recently finished
General Resolution was
concerned with the proposal by Debian Account Manager Jörg Jaspert about Debian
membership changes, especially in regard to non technical /
package-oriented contributions to the project. Lucas Nussbaum
blogged about the
different options, and the general meaning of this General Resolution. In the
end, the second option, Invite the DAM to further discuss until vote or
consensus, leading to a new proposal, won.

Gerfried Fuchs
announced
two services that facilitate the tracking of what's going on on
backports.org, an unofficial service
offering updated packages for the current stable release. One of the new
services is a
security
tracker, the other one is a version comparison between the
different Debian releases and the package versions available on backports.org.

Since version 1.2 of the
GTK tool kit has been
orphaned by its upstream developers as well as its Debian maintainers for quite
some time and has also collected a number of
bugs in the meantime, it is
scheduled to be removed during the releasing cycle for Debian Squeeze,
the version following Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 Lenny. However, several
packages are still depending on that library. Josselin Mouette
created a
list of the concerned packages and tried to find alternative applications.

Morten Kjeldgaard
argued,
that there are still a lot of useful (scientific) applications depending on
GTK+ 1.2, which are still in use. Charles Plessy
explained,
that with nobody taking care of GTK+ 1.2, there is no other choice but to port
these applications to newer versions of that tool kit, which has worked very
well for other examples.

Greg Price
reported
about a Bug Squashing Party which was held last Sunday and was hosted by the
student computing group of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 15 people
contributed to resolutions or partial resolutions of 11 RC bugs, lowering the
number of release critical bugs to 105. Greg also pointed to
some scripts they found useful
to create lists of relevant bugs.

Charles Plessy
wondered
if it would help the release to file properly justified 'requests for removal'
bugs for packages that have a low popularity
contest value, more or less inactive maintainers and generally seem to be
in bad shape, maybe even orphaned upstream-wise. Christian Perrier's
answer
affirmed this idea.

Jörg Jaspert announced
that Frank Lichtenheld has been added to the FTP team.

According to the unofficial
RC-bugs count, the upcoming release Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 Lenny is
currently affected by 112 release critical bugs. 39 of them have already been
fixed in Debian's unstable branch. Of the remaining 73 release critical bugs,
30 already have a patch (which might need testing) and 7 are marked as pending.

Ignoring these bugs as well as release critical bugs for packages in contrib or
non-free, 34 release critical bugs remain to be solved for the release to
happen.

Please note that these are a selection of the more important security
advisories of the last two weeks. If you need to be kept up to date about
security advisories released by the Debian Security Team, please subscribe to
the security mailing
list for announcements.

Currently 492 packages are orphaned and 118 packages are up for adoption.
Please take a look at the recentreports
to see if there are packages you are interested in or view the complete list of
packages which need
your help.

Please help us create this newsletter. We still need more volunteer writers
to watch the Debian community and report about what is going on. Please see the
contributing
page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your mail
at debian-publicity@lists.debian.org.